Global Culture – America’s Strongest Lever Of Power
The launch of the Sputnik into space by the Soviets in 1956 changed the world of popular culture even more than it changed the world of geopolitics.
It made the Americans realise that world dominance would have to be achieved with soft power, not only by winning the armaments race.
Today America is the centre of world culture.
It has come to occupy this position because it consciously exported American culture as cultural feedstock across the world.
Before the period of the World War, Americans had seen culture through European eyes.
Importing art and exhibiting European culture was something big businessmen did in a bid to acquire respectability.
The aspiration for a good taste made captains of industry such as the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Guggenheims donate generously to found museums, galleries and cultural foundations. The promotion of mass culture by private trusts and establishments has been a characteristic of American social life.
It is true that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain were some bright stars in literature. There was also a Hudson River school of painting. Intellectual centres in the universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton were thriving. America had also made an original contribution to architecture in the form of the skyscraper! But America was not a culturally advanced place. It was seen as provincial backwaters compared to London, Paris or Vienna.
In the generation during and right after the First World War, young writers and poets such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Steinback, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill and William Faulkner wrote about American society.
This was a generation that had an openness to the outside world. When the Nazis overran Europe, many artists, scientists and intellectuals fled to America. These included musicians such as Kurt Weill , Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok and Arnold Schoenberg, scientists Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein; social scientists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer; Architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer amongst others
In every area of intellectual exertion, America welcomed talent with open arms and without prejudice. This eclectic approach made them profit from the contribution of every source. Due to this diversity of input, its culture began to acquire a universalism that continues to give it enormous strength and advantage to the present day
Jazz and its offspring are in many ways the archetype of American universalism. This music became a planetary phenomenal thanks to the power of music radio. The foxtrot and the Charleston, Swing, Blues and Bebop allowed radio to take off. This led to a boom in advertising in the late 1930s.
Music was central to the success of big Hollywood movies which helped, in turn, to pave the way for television and with it came the worldwide triumph of audio-visual media. America became the biggest cinema market in the world.
With the intensifying of the Cold War, culture became big business and the culture industry became -indirectly -a part of the larger military-industrial complex in terms of American core interest. The recording industry, the motion picture industry, theatre and publishing were not only booming businesses but also recipients of private patronage and federal administration’s subsidies
The global diffusion of art and culture from America was supported purposefully by the government and later by private enterprises. The Communication revolution aided its accelerated spread. The power of America was established in every household through television. Every American fad and fashion was spread by cross-fertilisation, juxtaposition and instantaneous circulation via technology. The Americans also realised that cultural expressions are highly context-driven and universal culture may appeal to only a small minority and therefore they ensured that the world also came to America for an experience of high culture. Just as its universities became the leading innovators, in the 1960s New York became the front-ranking world market for arts. In the 1964 Venice Biennale, Pop Art exploded into the world scene and America became the centre of ‘avant-gardism’
America also changes the definition of art and artistic belongingness, not only in popular culture but also in academic and political circles. Before the Second World War, when Europe ruled culture, the truly civilised person was stereotyped as white European.
After America opened itself deliberately by the 1960s, any person of any nationality or ethnicity could arrive into the American cultural scene and succeed or be the recipient of what was being exported from there. The ‘barbarian’ was anyone hostile to progress, democracy, market forces, intellectual and social innovation namely anybody rejecting the values of America which were by definition also the values of the “free world”
The openness and embracing of the outside world was decisive in aiding the assent of the American elite.
It made it more internationalist in outlook and acceptable to all communities.
America became the elite centre for the development of a universal global culture.
America adopted Porsche, Mercedes, Gucci, Dior and Saville Row just as much as it embraced Chinese food or Brie and Chablis. The market in America supported the most niche cultural expressions – the music of Johnny Cage, the minimalism of Philip Glass, native Indian flute players from the Amazon or European experimental cinema.
The classic example of this two-way corridor was the success of the French women’s magazine Elle. Its American edition was very little French-influenced and way more American international in its attitude and content. Conversely, the globalisation of the American modern woman was manifest in the success of the ‘Cosmopolitan’, an all -American magazine which enjoyed worldwide success with numerous foreign editions and millions of copies of sale. Great American publications and publishing houses got foreigners at the helm like the Briton, Harold Evans at Random House and the Indian Sonny Mehta at Knopf. Another British woman, Tina Brown became editor of the ‘New Yorker’ in 1992 and thus the east coast intellectual establishment showcased its porosity.
The largest mass culture vehicle of the 20th century was rock music and it became a means of identification and communication between the members of the younger generation across the planet be it India, China, Latin America and even the Arab world. Grand tours were organized to promote rock bands worldwide.
One unique feature of this American universalism is that rock music did not kill national musical traditions but led to increasing cultural cross-breeding along with technological innovations such as digital sound, new instruments etc. It has led to a high-tech synthesis. America has become the champion and manager of diversity and also its catalyst.
To conclude, today our reactions and preferences are driven by a strong universal American cultural influence –direct and indirect.
The biggest control it exercises now is the control of positive and negative imagery –internet content, information flows, data and AudioVisual imagery which I shall cover in a subsequent article.
India has a huge opportunity to partner and capture more than its fair share and become the Eastern power in ‘global Americana’. That space is today is being taken by Koreans and the Chinese. India has all the natural advantages which it must capitalise.
